peer poverty

Peer poverty occurs when people lose their sense of self, or worse, never develop a degree of intrinsic motivation or reasons for acting of their own volition, in favor of following the continuous unrelenting demands of others. The consequences of peer poverty were among playwright George Bernard Shaw's greatest fears, namely living an inauthentic existence and discovering near the end of your life that you'd lived solely for the inane and selfish reasons of others. The pain of this disclosure, he feared, would bedevil you till the end of your days, haunting you with the notion that you could have gone anywhere, been anything, and done anything but for a simple understanding of the dynamics of peer pressure.
From Real Education Begins in September